From: Dave Thomas <dave@...>
Date: 2003-04-23T08:02:09+09:00
Subject: Cleaning up...

Folks:

There an interesting situation developing. As people contribute 
additional library code to the standard distribution, we end up in the 
situation where we have a lot of duplication (for example cgi-lib vs. 
cgi, forwardable vs. delegate, fileutils vs. ftools, Date.strprime vs 
Time.strptime, getoptlong vs. getopts) and so on. We also have some 
strange design issues (for example DateTime has the most powerful time 
parsing routines, but no way of generating a Time object). All this 
leads to confusion: as a newcomer to Ruby, am I supposed to use ftools 
or fileutils, for example.

Now, I can see that some folks might argue that this is an historical 
accident: we need to keep all of these libraries around in order to be 
compatible with old code. However, that doesn't seem to be a genuine 
reason. Ruby in reality has very poor compatiblity between major 
releases: a fair number of the 1.6 code examples in the PickAxe fail 
under 1.8, and an larger number give warnings. Major changes such as 
CGI#[] have been made, breaking a whole lot of code.

So, if we're happy to make releases incompatible, perhaps we should use 
the opportunity to tidy up the libraries as well.

I propose that we create a subdirectory of lib called lib/old, and move 
all the obsolete library files in to it. This will break some code, but

1. The break is obvious: a compile-time error
2. The fix is simple: change require 'cgi-lib' to 'old/cgi-lib'

I know that Ruby isn't supposed to be minimal. However, I'm thinking 
that the current situation is starting to get ugly, and Ruby is not an 
ugly language.


Cheers


Dave